Traveler Information Guidance and Evacuation Route (TIGER)

Project Description

The Minnesota Department of Transportation embarked upon the TIGER (Traveler Information Guidance and Emergency Routing) Project in the summer of 2003. The geographical scope of this project is the transportation corridor between the Minneapolis/St. Paul metropolitan area (pop. 2.9 million) and St. Cloud (pop. 90,000), which is located 60 miles northwest. This corridor is comprised of three parallel roadways, Interstate 94, US Highway 10, and State Highway 55. The TIGER project is part of a larger multi-modal effort to address urgent concerns resulting from rapid growth in population and development in one of the fastest growing corridor in the state.

The TIGER project was an effort to deploy additional fixed and mobile surveillance cameras, dynamic message signs, and traffic detection within the corridor and to integrate the operations of two traffic management centers, the Transportation Operations and Communications Center (TOCC) in St. Cloud and the (RTMC) Regional Transportation Management Center in the Twin Cities Metropolitan Area. While traffic management/ITS strategies currently exist in the more suburban and urban areas of the corridor, the devices are monitored and controlled from one of the two centers with little coordination between the two. Through the TIGER project, the TOCC and the RTMC operations were largely integrated allowing for the share of control and monitoring responsibilities and a more highly coordinated approach to traffic management.